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<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\tThese developments, whose ethos Paglen calls \u201cmachine realism,\u201d mean that machine-readable images can now do far more things than previous images, at far different scales. The video camera at the grocery store self-checkout kiosk automatically flags instances of suspected shoplifting. The Samsara navigation system, a suite of road- and driver-facing cameras installed inside commercial trucks, punitively scrutinizes drivers for safety violations. The ImageNet database, used as the \u201cdefault training set for numerous [AI] models,\u201d creates the reductive taxonomies underpinning facial recognition technologies. These kinds of machine vision systems normalize surveillance in service of capital; the term \u201cmachine realism\u201d is a nod to the late philosopher Mark Fisher\u2019s concept of \u201ccapitalist realism\u201d as a belief system that limits our ability to imagine alternatives to it.<\/p>\n
\n\tSuch forms of surveillance either do not \u201crequire a human in the analytic loop\u201d or require a human only at select moments, such as Microscan\u2019s imaging system designed to automate most packaging, shipping, and logistics for the electronics and pharmaceutical industries. What\u2019s more, the advent of \u201cmachine-to-machine seeing\u201d means that the digital images humans do see are always looking back at us and adapting accordingly. On social media, for example, \u201cthe platform measures our dwell time, shares, comments, even biometric responses, and uses that information to refine its algorithmic targeting.\u201d This responsive aspect of machine-readable images makes surveillance not only more pervasive but also more effective, enabling machine systems to extract value from human users at greater scale and with greater precision than previously possible.<\/p>\n
MOST OF HOW TO SEE LIKE A MACHINE<\/em><\/strong>repackages Paglen\u2019s previous articles and talks, which themselves build on his art practice. The two chapters on machine realism, for instance, reference his and Kate Crawford\u2019s viral 2019 project ImageNet Roulette<\/em>, which invited users to upload images of themselves that ImageNet would then label. Paglen and Crawford, for example, were mislabeled as a \u201cmicroeconomist\u201d and a \u201cnewsreader,\u201d respectively. Through the project, hordes of people were confronted with the biases of facial recognition technology for the first time. The book\u2019s longest chapter, \u201cSociety of the Psyop,\u201d pulls from Paglen\u2019s best-known writings, originally published as a series of three e-flux<\/em> articles in 2024, and draws on his artistic research into UFOs, psyops, and magic to show how these fringe-seeming perceptual phenomena inform today\u2019s media environment.<\/p>\n \n\tThe story Paglen tells about the mainstreaming of \u201ccognitive warfare\u201d\u2014\u201cusing technology to alter the cognition of human targets, who are often unaware of any such attempt\u201d\u2014turns on the phenomenological quirks of human perception. He distinguishes between \u201cstage magic,\u201d which holds that \u201creality is relatively stable but our perceptions of it are glitchy,\u201d and \u201cmagick,\u201d which holds that \u201cperception and reality cannot be disentangled.\u201d \u201cBy altering our perceptions,\u201d he explains, \u201cwe can effectively alter reality itself.\u201d Paglen traces magickal attempts to mold reality back to midcentury covert operations such as the CIA\u2019s infamous MKUltra program\u2014the one exploring mind control through electroshock therapy, hypnosis, and LSD. But the argument\u2019s force lies in his suggestion that those previously isolated psychological experiments have become the modus operandi of networked culture. \u201cToday\u2019s psyops,\u201d he concludes, \u201care cheap, scalable, automated, and widely deployable with built-in real-time feedback mechanisms.\u201d It\u2019s a form of mind control involving machines, and it\u2019s become so normalized we often struggle to recognize it as such.<\/p>\n \n\tThe book\u2019s newest chapter, \u201cArchives of the Future,\u201d culminates this research arc and brings the conversation up to date. Here, Paglen contends that, post-AI, all images have the quasi-indexical status of UFO photographs, meaning that we now live in \u201ca media environment where the visual codes of truth persist, but any causal link that once underwrote them has vanished.\u201d He likens this ambiguity\u2014where images appear at once \u201ctrue\u201d and \u201cfalse\u201d\u2014to superposition, a quantum physics concept in which a system exists in multiple theoretical positions until it has been measured. Under such circumstances, the factual status of an image\u2019s referent is functionally irrelevant; instead, the viewer\u2019s preexisting beliefs determine whether they choose to perceive a blip in the sky as evidence of extraterrestrial life.<\/p>\n PAGLEN\u2019S IDEAS ARE <\/strong>smart and suggestive,with the added virtue of being expressed in prose so clear it makes the opacity of other theoretical writing feel like a psyop. This lucidity not only makes his work readable but also staves off the perception that discourse about UFOs and the CIA must be riddled with conspiratorial paranoia. Yet the book medium, which favors the expository side of Paglen\u2019s practice, can make his artworks feel subordinate to his research. That\u2019s also in part a function of Paglen\u2019s practice itself, which has long been critiqued for its didactic bent. How to See Like a Machine<\/em> thus implicitly raises Paglen\u2019s critical question\u2014What does this image do?<\/em>\u2014 about his own artistic output.<\/p>\n \n\tHis artworks often provide the impetus for, and serve as illustrations of, his formidable research. Paglen\u2019s 2023 Pace exhibition, \u201cYou\u2019ve Just Been F*cked by PSYOPS,\u201d for instance, contained a video interview with Richard Doty\u2014who fabricated UFO folklore while working for the US Air Force Office of Special Investigations\u2014that explored ideas about UFOlogy discussed in the \u201cSociety of the Psyop\u201d chapter. While the video enables viewers to judge whether they consider Doty a reliable narrator, its content-level takeaways could easily have been\u2014and, not long after, were\u2014delivered in print media. This strand of Paglen\u2019s art functions as a stepping stone to his larger theoretical arguments, as evidenced by the abridged and unabridged guides he wrote to accompany the exhibition and the subsequent e-flux<\/em> articles and book chapter.<\/p>\n \n\tOther works by Paglen physically instantiate his arguments beyond what writing alone can do. The Pace exhibition also included photographs of unidentified objects orbiting Earth and kite-like sculptures resembling military satellites designed to confuse enemy radars. These artworks do require some background context to be fully understood, but once you have that context, the art not only provides test cases for the perceptual phenomena Paglen describes in his writing, it also testifies to humans\u2019 capacity to exercise our own agency and to watch the machines and the governments that are watching us.<\/p>\n \n\tWhat, ultimately, does How to See Like a Machine<\/em> do? Like an image in our current AI age, the book sits with its potential audience in superposition. For Paglen enthusiasts, it traces the arc of his recent theoretical ideas, though most of his fans will already be familiar with those ideas. For Paglen newcomers, on the other hand, it makes a superb case for moving beyond a blinkered, semiotic media paradigm. The problem is that most discourse gets stuck in its own echo chamber, along the lines of what Doty calls \u201cMagruder\u2019s Principle\u201d: It\u2019s easier to reinforce a preexisting belief than to change it. Despite its convincing research, Paglen\u2019s book may well prove its own point: that when it comes to facts, people see what they want to see.<\/p>\n \n\tThe media literacy gap, after all, is in part Paglen\u2019s subject. After undergoing a media paradigm shift around the turn of the century, from broadcast and print media to Internet-based media, society appears to be undergoing another change, from Internet-based to AI-based media. The New Models<\/em> podcast, whose hosts (Caroline Busta and Julian Wadsworth, aka Lil Internet) Paglen includes in the book\u2019s acknowledgements, call these three media eras \u201clinear,\u201d \u201cnetworked,\u201d and \u201cneural,\u201d respectively. They argue that not only are most people intellectually and emotionally unprepared for the emergent shift (from networked to neural media), but many of us haven\u2019t even processed the previous one (from linear to networked media).<\/p>\n \n\tPaglen\u2019s ideas, collected between two covers, carve a clean, linear path through our messy neural era, engaging in the kind of big-picture sense-making that books remain well suited to do, even as AI encroaches on this terrain. The stakes of those ideas are profound: As machines optimize their feedback loops, often for exploitative purposes, they have the \u201ccapacity to reshape the cognitive and emotional landscape through which reality is experienced [by humans].\u201d Most artworks and books can\u2019t single-handedly reshape that landscape, but at their best, they enable humans to see it with greater clarity\u2014and to model the kind of agency and imagination needed to alter it. Oddly enough, even as Paglen demonstrates how machine vision is shifting our media paradigms, he also demonstrates how human vision can help us navigate the shifts. \u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n [analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-in-america\/aia-reviews\/trevor-paglens-machine-vision-ai-verso-1234782777\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/WEB-PAGLEN_inst_2023_05_10_V14.jpg?w=1024″] There\u2019s no shortage of speculation about what generative AI portends for culture: Visions range from a \u201cdead internet,\u201d in which bots produce the majority of online content, to utopic redistribution scenarios, in which universal basic income grants humans unprecedented creative leisure. But for more than a decade\u2014before many people had ever heard […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1913663","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1913663","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1913663"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1913663\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1913663"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1913663"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1913663"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![](\"https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/WEB-PAGLEN_inst_2023_05_10_V25.jpg?w=400\")
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